


A game of cat and mouse (where death plays the cat).

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Femslash February 2014 [10]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Challenge 2014, Femslash February, Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-11 22:50:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1178903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Um,” said the mousy girl. Winry Rockbell glanced up at her. “C-could you turn the page, please?”</p><p>“Eh? Of your book? I guess.” Winry reached over. A handful of sentences caught her attention as she flipped: Something about two girls kissing. Her ears heated; she returned to staring at the automail illustrations. “What are you doing by yourself in the back, anyway?”</p><p>“O-oh.” The girl linked her hands together. Her pallid fingers were almost translucent in their paleness, as though her veins should have shown greenish-violet below the surface of her icy skin. “I just like b-being by myself is all.”</p><p>“Mind the company, then?”</p><p>The girl shook her head. “I like you,” she said quietly, hovering over each word. “You can stay.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A game of cat and mouse (where death plays the cat).

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Femslash February. Prompt B4 on my bingo card, "Supernatural AU".
> 
> As it turns out, writing a completely separate one-shot every single fucking day for a month gets exceedingly tiring. I love femslash, god damn, and I'm glad I'm putting it out, but suffice to say that they don't call it a challenge for nothing.
> 
> Unbeta'd/unedited/etc. Enjoy at your own risk!

The girl with her nose thoroughly shoved into the crease of the book pages in the back of the library seemed pleasant enough, or maybe Winry was more apt to trust some mousy creature poring over a paperbound fictional respite than any of the myriad hooligans in the front. She needed a touch of research into Xing, not an army of lemurs hooting about her skirt apparently a few centimetres too short for their undeveloped brains to process. Smoothing said blue skirt, Winry gestured towards the chair beside the girl.

“Is this seat occupied?” For a moment the girl didn’t answer. Her pupils rolled around the rims of her eyes like a ball rolling around the inside of a hollow cup. Against the curious onset of gooseflesh, Winry zipped up her jacket to the top. “Er, excuse me? Is that book any good?”

When the silence continued, unbroken in the dusty back alleys of the library, Winry pulled out the chair and seated herself. Her satchel thudded to the ground. The heavy book she’d had tucked under an arm smacked hard onto the tabletop. Diagrams of Xingese automail danced across the thick pages. “Um.” She glanced up the mousy girl and tugged a pair of gloves from her satchel: She hadn’t expected the library to be so damn cold. “C-could you turn the page, please?”

“Eh? Of your book? I guess.” Winry reached over. A handful of sentences caught her attention as she flipped: Something about two girls kissing. Her ears heated; she returned to staring at the automail illustrations. “What are you doing by yourself in the back, anyway?”

“O-oh.” The girl linked her hands together. Her pallid fingers were almost translucent in their paleness, as though her veins should have shown greenish-violet below the surface of her icy skin. “I just like b-being by myself is all.”

“Mind the company, then?”

The girl shook her head. “I like you,” she said quietly, hovering over each word. “ _You_ can stay.”

“Thanks. Name’s Winry, by the by. I’m the girl workin’ at Atelier Automail, if you’ve ever seen the place.” Winry sketched out the relevant diagrams of the automail in which she’d been interested. The segmented black limbs, so disparate from the silvery-grey smooth plates of Amestrisian automail, had danced through her dreams for weeks now. A few more times the girl softly asked her to turn the page of the novel; Winry complied without looking. Once she finished the final essential diagram, she checked her watch. Almost closing time. Huddling further into her jacket, she closed the book. Then she noticed the girl’s thin attire of a meagre blue blouse and matching knee-length skirt; she wore white stockings but no shoes. And thick glasses that framed her button nose and wide eyes. “Aren’t you cold?” Winry blinked. “Oi, I never caught your name.”

“S-sciezka,” the girl answered mildly, fiddling with her glasses. “Th-thank you for asking.” She offered the girl a hand, but Sciezka slipped from the chair, shaking her head again. “I-I need to go.”

Before Winry could say another word, the mousy girl had fled between two shelves of books in the section on religion. “Oi, _wait_!” She ducked into the aisle, but Sciezka had vanished. Frowning, Winry slid against the shelf. A thump startled her. With a sigh she dusted the cover of the fallen book. A ghostly apparition curled around stitched embroidery that spelled out: _Interpreting the Xabbala: On the Supernaturae and Beastes Thereof_. The queerness of the ancient tome brought a tight smile to her mouth. She replaced the book and checked out the one she wished to read.

That night she opened the novel to the prologue. A dead girl in the bottom of a wishing well. Another girl tossing a coin in begging for happiness. The dead girl coming to life.

Despite the Rush Valley heat, Winry buried herself in blankets, wrapping herself in a protective chrysalis of warmth.

 

She didn’t return to the library until the following week, novel and apple pie in tow, the former handed to the library clerk who claimed that she’d never seen the book before, nor was it in the records, the latter smuggled under her shirt. As usual, no one in the back end. With a sigh, Winry left the apple pie under her chair while she continued her research.

“Um-m, is this seat taken?”

Winry lifted her chin. Sciezka. The mousy girl, dressed the same as the last time they had met. She grinned and waved her down to the chair. “Sit down! I wanted to talk to you. Been waiting all week.”

Sciezka squeaked. “F-for _me_?”

“You see any other _yous_ around?” Patting the bottom of the chair, Winry winked. “Talk to me, Shesh. Mind if I call you that?”

The girl swallowed, then blinked at herself as if mildly surprised. “That sounds kind of cute. Y-yes, you can call me that.”

“Call me Win. ‘Cause I always do.”

They talked. About Winry. Automail mechanic, here in Rush Valley for the foreseeable future. Her personal goal to bring the best of Xingese automail and apply it to her Amestrisian work. Her pansexuality, her previous relationships, her future dreams of becoming the Pantheress of Rush Valley—of _automail_ , she emphasised while Sciezka giggled. She’d been looking for a mate for her dog, had considered the healthy male of a friend of hers named Black Hayate. No, not the friend, the _dog_. But more Winry turned the tables to the girl who appeared to live bodily in the back of a dusty library.

Sciezka. Who claimed that she couldn’t remember very much but that she was very sorry about it. That she’d been in Rush Valley since fairly recently, living prior to that in Central apparently. Yes, she spent most of her time in the library. She loved dogs and stupid romance novels and the paranormal. Specifically aliens. She hated ghost stories with a passion; every time Winry would attempt to bring one up, Sciezka would change the topic with that hesitant persistence of hers, such a paradox that Winry came back week after week to the library. The girl always refused Winry’s gifts of food and particularly of touch. Winry chalked up the effect to perhaps some sort of general discomfort. Sciezka had indicated her asexuality, which Winry had assured her changed absolutely nothing, but somehow that didn’t seem to translate to an avoidance of touch. Her favourite dessert _had been_ ice cream, butternut pecan, a distinction that alerted Winry and cut the conversation short that day. She deflected questions on her parents or her past with a deft expertise. Yet slowly the pieces fell together, little hints here and there, not knowing the identity of the current fuehrer, giving different ages and various birthdays, referring to authors long since past from the public consciousness and blinking in confusion at the newer names.

One day Sciezka asked Winry about her ideal woman. “W-we should write lists! Of the traits we’d see in our perfect w-women. Like to see, I mean.” She never blushed—her skin never changed in any lighting—but she giggled, and that was close enough.

Winry wrote out her list, and Sciezka hers. Then they folded the papers into tight envelopes and swapped; at the last second Winry tried to snag Sciezka’s hand, but the girl jerked away so rapidly she felt nothing but air. Chill air. Air that had somehow frozen into ice around her fingers. As they bid one another good night, Winry gingerly examined her hand for frostbite. Nothing. Unfolding the list, she experienced a distinct sensation of her heart actually sinking whole through her chest and hollowing out her innards: Each of Sciezka’s points described Winry, and most of them focused on personality, whereas Winry had answered hers idealistically and physically. She followed her heart and sank to her knees. The heels of her palms ground fire and tears from her eyes. “I’m such a fucking idiot.”

 

The next day she met Sciezka once more at the library. Or at least Sciezka’s ridiculously hotter twin: The girl’s massive breasts—Winry could have sworn that Sciezka had somehow grown from an A to an F—were clearly attempting to bore out of her tight shirt; her luscious coppery coils of hair curled around her shoulders; the beautiful blouse, along with the short miniskirt, accented her slim waist; an alluring few centimetres of her gorgeous thighs showed between that ridiculously short skirt and the tops of her lusciously snow white thigh-highs that sullied Winry’s mind with much dirtier thoughts. Her lipstick shone pretty-pink as Sciezka smiled. “O-or may I sit?” Unable to speak, Winry indicated the chair. Sciezka glided across the floor as though her feet floated above the ground. She folded her arms across her chest, pushing her already noticeable bust up further. Winry stared at her hands. “What do you think?”

“ _Damn_ ,” Winry said for lack of a better word. Damn her. Damn everything. “Are you feeling okay? You don’t have to impress me, you know.”

Sciezka tilted her head to one side. “What do you mean? I-I’m sorry if my clothes don’t look good!” She hung her head. “I j-just wanted to wear something nice for—for you—”

Winry tried to clasp her hands, yet Sciezka pulled away again, _damn_ her. “You’re a succubus, aren’t you? A vampire? A poltergeist?”

Sciezka’s mouth dropped open. “W-w-wha—no— _I_ —” She ran. Back into the twin shelves housing the section on religion, her blouse and skirt and shoes disappearing into smoke, her body unravelling from her limbs inwards like the smile of the Cheshire cat. Yet this time Winry threw herself across the expanse between them and tackled the apparition head-on. The contact transmuted her to ice.

 

A library fire. She had insisted on salvaging as many books as she could, and that was all she could remember, truthfully. She’d no idea who she was, beyond _Central_ and _library_ and _Sciezka_ , and that she’d awoken unable to touch, akin to vapour, akin to some sort of gas capable of congealing and vibrating to produce sound. Theoretically she had tried to become solid, tangible enough to actively alter the world around her. But all she could do was manage to become enough of _her_ to board a train and not seep through the metal door, and only then that trick had worked only once out of a desperation born of the place where she had died.

Ice. Ice, the final breath on her lips, a prayer to cool the fire.

 

“You can’t bring someone back from the dead, can you?”

“It’s not worth it. Trust me, Win. Who is it? Your parents? They’ve been dead a long time, too long—even a second is too long if you’re fucking dead—if Al and I couldn’t bring Mom back— _shit_ , Win, Winry, please don’t tell me you’ve smashed your head on your wrench so many fucking times you’ve actually lost every piece of— _Win, don’t do it, don’t ever do it_ —”

“But _why_? I’m not gonna do it, Ed; I just want to know why, what happened.”

“But—”

“You don’t have to talk about it if it’ll hurt. But I just—you were able to create a body, weren’t you? Just not a soul?”

“Souls don’t exist. Or at least they’re not scientifically proven.”

“ _Ed_.”

“. . . yeah. We made a . . . a _thing_. But it wasn’t alive.”

“So if you had a _soul_ , could you theoretically transmute a body?”

“If you’re gonna write a book or something, sure, that sounds really fuckin’ fantastic. _Great_ read. I’ll put it on the Fuck-You bestseller list.”

“I-I’m sorry. I can shut up.”

“. . . I guess it’s okay. What were you saying?”

“You’d just need the, er, materials, and then something of the person’s body, right? Like their blood, or their hair, or their bones?”

“Fuck kind of novel are you _writing_? Yeah. Then you find some shmuck dumb enough to get xir limbs chopped off ‘cause human transmutation’s a pain in the happiness of anyone ever affected by it ever.”

“I promise I won’t do anything, Ed.”

“Okay, I guess. You’d better fuckin’ not. I’m gonna call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Mm. Good night, Ed.”

“Night. Oh, uh, Al says hi.”

“Tell him I said hi back! Oh, and tell him that I love ‘im. And you too.”

“G-good night.”

 

Mr Garfiel hugged her good-bye on the train station. “I’ll be back within the fortnight,” she yelled from the window, and he replied with an exaggerated salute. In Central she swamped Riza Hawkeye’s apartment and discovered that Black Hayate had gotten himself a mate in the form of Kain Fuery’s new dog, an opportunity upon which the newly promoted Warrant Officer jumped the moment he moved out of his old dorm and into an apartment of his own. A snow white bitch named Panzer. Winry adopted one of the male puppies, christened him Pansy after his mother, and bustled about on her graveyard shift. She cross-checked Sciezka’s favourite authors. Amontillado and Heathcliff and Winston. Narrowed down the options to a span of a few scant years. Pored over newspaper clippings until the black and white letters traced themselves into the paper of her dreams and flitted across her retinas every time she lowered her eyelids. When she _found_ the fire, she wiped the tears from her eyes and slept for the first time in six days.

Captain Hawkeye helped her heft the shovels to the graveyard. “This is technically against the law,” she warned.

“So was planning a coup against the fuehrer.”

The captain smirked. “Touché.”

Sciezka Brzenska. Winry collected several bones, just enough for a specimen, in a sealed plastic bag. Hawkeye smoothed the graveside while Winry knelt in the bushes and vomited out the entire contents of her body and then coughed out empty air to pretend to ignore the tears burning her throat.

 

“Are you sure about it?”

“Never been surer. Please don’t tell Ed.”

“It’ll work; I’ve been so much more careful this time, Winry. I’ll tell Brother, but only afterwards.”

She nodded. Turned to the wavering form, teetering on the brink of reality and the shadow realm beyond, of the mousy girl she loved. “Are you sure about it?”

Sciezka’s smile flickered. “N-never been surer, Win.”

The transmutation circled blazed bluish white. Blazed the colour of ice. She shielded her face with a crooked arm. Closed her eyes. Listened where her vision would fail her. Heartbeats: one, two three. No screams. No noise.

No: crying.

_She was such a fucking idiot._

Al stroked her fingers tenderly in a soundless apology. She swayed, her consciousness threatening to give way, when she noticed how uncharacteristically soft his hands felt. And then the little things, the strange tiny scars over the fingertips as of multitudes of papercuts. The sharply trimmed fingernails. The callouses down the centre of the palm, like the placeholders of book covers.

“W-winry? May . . . may I kiss you?”

“No.” She drew the trembling woman in to her embrace. “You _have_ to.”


End file.
